Carnegie Mellon Starts Offering Courses Online

OckNock writes "Carnegie Mellon is offering free courses through its Open Learning Initiative. Unlike MIT's OpenCourseWare which has 700 courses available, Carnegie Mellon currently only has five courses available. However, Carnegie Mellon is unique in that they offer '...courses [that] include a number of innovative online instructional components such as: cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, simulations,' so rather than just offering course material Carnegie Mellon is pursuing a more interactive, community approach. Carnegie Mellon is also unique in that they offer the courses as an Academic Version which '...is offered through educational institutions for credit awarded by the student's home institution.' Interestingly, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds both MIT's OpenCourseWare and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative ('Funding for the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon has been provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.') Sadly, the courses are not supported on any open source platforms or even any open source web browsers. More importantly, I'm curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online."

Comments

Credit?

[wmspringer]

hmm...so does your university have to pick this up before you can get credit for it? I supposed it would be too much to hope for to be able to take classes for credit, for free..

Re:Well...

[jabberjaw]

Really? Ok, so they may not be "courses" but professors in many fields have been putting their lecture notes online long before MIT's program was launched. It is rather trivial to find them.

A bit of background...

[Capt'n Hector]

A few years ago, I took a course (Astro 10) at UC Berkeley that had ~900 students. The largest lecture hall holds 300. The solution was to provide videos of the lectures online, both streaming and archived. We were urged NOT to come to lecture, and instead view them online. These were a great resource in not only studying for tests, but also for casual learning. I pointed a few friends and relatives of mine to these online lectures as a great way to learn about astronomy.

I hope this is done more often, not with lecture notes or online material - it's useless. Live lectures however are not. Universities sell degrees, not educations. It would be easy to provide such resources to the general public; it could be a recruiting tool, advertising, etc. Since you're not going to get a degree no matter how many courses you watch online, it doesn't cheapen what the university offers for a *ahem* small fee.

Monumental

[XMichael]

Perhaps I'm a bit of an idealist, but I feel this is a monumental break through in our society. This could very well be one of the major turning points; when education becomes a life long venture for more than just an elite few. Almost something of a trendy, and accessible thing to do, like Yoga or Salsa Lessons. Perhaps people consider the ease of options and prestigue a good combination, and people evolve there education patterns to a continue cycle..

Sure beats the "norm" of High school -> College / University -> Job.

It would be excellent to see this pattern break.
Priceless Photos | Complete CCTV Security Cameras

This isn't just lecture notes...

[jwnichls]

I think a lot of posters here are hung on thinking that online learning == lecture notes, webcasts, and other non-interactive material. This project seems to be going a lot further... They're providing interactive cognitive tutors that are based on solid research into how people learn.

Unlike all of the projects that have been mentioned in this forum, the purpose of providing online courses here is not just to make the information available but to do research on how people learn.

Reply To E-Mail RE: OS/Browser

[BlueStrat]

Thank you for your interest in our project and for your suggestions. Each
of the OLI courses has a different set of browser and operating system
requirements. In general, only the Java and Flash, plug-ins are required
for all the courses and Director plug-in is required for The Causal
Reasoning Course. All of the courses have been tested against IE, Netscape,
Mozilla and Firefox. With few exceptions (e.g. a statistic tutor which only
runs from IE) the courses can be accessed from an open source platform
using Mozilla / Firefox.

The 'Test and Configure' pages, at present, do not reflect this fact. The
configuration instructions were designed to aid the majority of users,
greater than 90% of which are accessing the courses from Windows. The
instructions were our attempt to keep technical instructions simple for
many users who are intimidated by too many options in technical
requirements. We are looking at updating the test and configure pages to
better communicate with users who are using a greater variety of browsers
and Operating Systems.

We invite you to become part of our user testing community by using the
courses on your configuration and letting us know what works and what
doesn't and we will post the information and attempt to make the courses as
compatible with as many configurations as possible.

As an aside, the software behind the OLI project (with few exceptions) was
built from and runs using Open Source software. Many of the content authors
also use open source tools (emacs, ant, xalan, xerces, etc.)

Kind Regards,
Candace Thille

Project Director
Open Learning Initiative
Carnegie Mellon University